by Alec Saracen
The car rolled to a halt in the embassy car park. It had been a quiet journey. Zhai had been in no mood to talk, Umbiba had spent most of the trip glaring suspiciously at Grey Hawk as if she was suddenly going to murder them all, and Ceq had been gazing absently out of the window, a half-formed frown behind her lips.
It was Ceq who Grey Hawk's attention was focused on. A seed had been planted, and the bodyguard's mind was fertile soil. Ask, Grey Hawk thought, trying to will Ceq into challenging Zhai. You must have some curiosity in you. Ask.
As the engine's hum faded, Zhai looked up.
“What now?” he said to Grey Hawk.
“You can contact me whenever you need me. Until then, I'll be working alone.”
“Sowing chaos, I suppose,” Zhai said, with a whisper of a smile. “Try not to get yourself killed, Grey Hawk. You weren't needed today, but...” He trailed off, the smile fading from his face. “Something is drawing closer. I can feel it, and we can't avoid it. Like the tide's coming in. All we can do is try to swim through it.”
Grey Hawk nodded. “Landing will only get bloodier from here on in. This isn't sustainable.”
“Agreed. Something's got to give, and I don't know what.” He snorted, as if recalling an old joke. “I'll tell you one thing, though. It won't be Thier.”
He began to reach for the door.
“Boss,” Ceq said.
His hand retracted. “Yes?”
Ceq's eyes flashed to Grey Hawk's, lingered there for an instant, then returned to Zhai. The ambassador didn't miss it, and the look he gave her was measured and deliberate, as if to say I know you had a hand in this, whatever it is.
Ceq hesitated. Do it, Grey Hawk thought. Ask him. Drag it out of him.
“I've been wondering about something,” she said slowly.
Zhai's eyes flickered to Grey Hawk again. “About what?”
“Naro,” Ceq said.
Zhai didn't reply for several long seconds. His face was impassive, but taut. Abruptly, he glanced at Umbiba.
“Captain, if you wouldn't mind waiting upstairs.”
“Yessir,” Umbiba said, his brow wrinkled with confusion, and exited the car. The door swung shut behind him.
Zhai turned to Ceq, stony-faced.
“You had six years to ask that, and you picked today,” he said. Anger discoloured his voice, undisguised. “Why the sudden interest?” He jerked his head at Grey Hawk. “She put you up to this, yes?”
Ceq didn't bother trying to lie. She nodded mutely.
“She can't work for you and not know,” Grey Hawk said. “It–”
“It's worked just fine so far,” Zhai snapped. “This is not secret information. This is on my fucking Encyclopedia Totalis page. Hell, it has a Totalis page. Several of them! All you had to do was plug my name into any fucking search engine and do some bloody research for once in your life. But no, you don't care about anything like that. Politics, history, the whole fucking fabric of the human race, it's all nothing to you, isn't it? Or at least it was until today. Now you decide to finally do the bare minimum, and not even on your own initiative, but because some Liberator told you to!”
Ceq listened to his outburst calmly as Zhai's voice rose and his face reddened. Every word was a projectile. Grey Hawk felt like she was witnessing the first stages of a volcanic eruption. First came the fireworks, with the real, quieter danger hot on its heels.
“Don't worry about it,” Ceq said. Zhai was breathing heavily, and sweat was starting to bead on his brow. “I'll just look it up.”
“No!” Zhai said, then visibly forced himself under control. “No,” he repeated, in a far more normal tone of voice. “I'd rather you hear it from me. I just – I thought you must know already. Everyone knows. You must be the only soul living on Megereth Station who doesn't, and you're my bloody bodyguard.” His laugh came out as a strained wheeze. “All right, then, Ceq. Here's your history lesson. I await your judgement, late as it may be.” He glanced at Grey Hawk. “And you, Liberator. You've scored a front row seat. Well done. Well done.”
“I'm interested to hear your perspective,” Grey Hawk said, as blandly as she could.
The ambassador glared at her, then sat back, composing himself. Rewrite your story all you like, Grey Hawk thought. You can’t polish this.
“It was 132,” Zhai began. “Twenty-seven years ago. Twins, I'm old. Back then, I was thirty-two years old, and I'd finally received my first real appointment. Naro. They always start the neophytes out on internal Coalition postings, and Naro was one of the cushiest. Sekkanen swung it for me. Even back then she was climbing the ladder, only a couple of rungs below old Ri Kum-Su – he was the Solid leader at the time. Dead now.”
Zhai paused, the fog of years attenuating his gaze. He didn't look at either of them. His eyes were focused on a spot light-years and decades away.
“It's a nice planet. Temperate. 0.8 gravity. Good air. Pleasant cities, by and by. True, the government was a little bit–” He made a wavering gesture with a hand. “Uncooperative. But at that stage of my career, it was better that than a pliable government in some shithole like Hechileng. I was happy with it. The usual progression was one or two postings as Consul on Coalition worlds, and then finally you'd be sent out into the real world. Back then, Coalition-Alliance tensions weren't too bad, all things considered, though they were getting worse. It was a peaceful, profitable galaxy for more or less everyone. With a few exceptions.”
Grey Hawk saw his eyes return to the present and turn her way. She returned his gaze levelly. 132 was around the time the first Liberators were entering the field, though their activities were confined to the penniless dictatorships surrounding Plenty in the galactic south-east. She imagined Black Horse's first mission, the military sabotage on Gorovac. Of course, she didn't have to imagine it – she had completed the mission herself in the simulation based on Black Horse's own recorded data, twice as fast as he had.
“It was business as usual in the Coalition,” Zhai said. He drifted again. When he spoke of the past, he seemed to disappear into it, leaving only his body behind. “The Consolidationists just about held a First Circle majority, but the crossbenchers held the balance of power. No vote was safe. The Devvies were more moderate back then. All they wanted was Bayard, as if the Alliance was going to give up its most profitable planet without a full-scale war. The Revvies – well, they were still insane. Some things never change.”
Keep talking around it, Ambassador. It won't do you any good, Grey Hawk thought, though she could see Zhai gradually moving towards the point, like a stray iota of matter circling the accretion disc of a ravenous black hole.
“So, I went to Naro,” the ambassador continued. “The first eight months were simple. I liaised between the local government and the Coalition, smoothed paths and greased wheels, made sure everything was running like clockwork. In truth, there wasn't much to do. Naro had always had a streak of independence in it, but I was treated courteously enough, and we had rules, protocols. They didn't love the Coalition, but they didn't hate it. They paid their fees. And then, one night...”
He trailed off, and a shadow of disquiet ghosted across his face.
“They woke me up at four in the morning,” he said slowly. “I remember that. I saw the time. I'd had a late night – drinks with the consulate staff. It was Jade's – the deputy consul's birthday. We ordered a cake, but we must have got the measurements wrong, because it was huge, far too big for our staff. Half of it was still sitting on the table when they briefed me. Coconut. Except, she didn't like coconut, and we didn't know.”
Another long pause. Zhai shook his head, as if trying to dispel some haze that had stolen over him.
“It was Mallo – my head of intelligence – and two people I didn't know. They turned out to be SSA. Black ops. I think I knew before they told me. They had that – hardness. In the face, the eyes. The sense that they were capable of anything. So, I asked them what was the big idea, and they said I should get dressed, because
there was a situation. That was the word they used. A situation.
“People were dead. Their people, a squad of three. Killed in a house in Arato, the capital.” Zhai's voice had descended into a low, emotionless monotone. “They had been infiltrating the place. The only occupants were a woman and her son, eighteen months old. It should have been easy – but the woman was an immigrant from Ankra Kek, where she'd worked for years as a mercenary for the mining companies. Combat specialist. That all came out later. As far as they knew, she was unemployed. The squad tripped some silent alarm, and she killed them all. They told me this, and I thought – I remember thinking, well, it could be worse. That was a manageable situation, and I told them that. Then they gave each other this look, this look, and when I saw it I knew there was worse to come.
“They told me why the squad had been infiltrating the house. Their orders were kidnap the son. We could cover that up, I said. Surely there was no evidence of that. That got the same look. There was, they said, because the squad wasn't just kidnapping the boy, but replacing him. I asked what the fuck they were talking about. Then one of them, the woman, lost her patience with their whole drip-feed of answers charade and told me that the squad had with them a – dupe. That was what she called it. A perfect genetic replica of the kid, flash-cloned and accelerated to the right age – brain-dead, obviously, like all flash-clones are, but physically indistinguishable from the real son.”
Ceq didn't react. Zhai glanced up at her, saw her expressionless face, and looked away quickly.
“And now she had it,” he said quietly. “Three armed men had broken into her house with a clone of her son, and there she was standing in a blood-covered bedroom, listening to her real son screaming while his clone lay silent on the floor, breathing but – mindless. She took them both and locked herself in a panic room, and within five minutes local police were on the scene.”
“So the plan was to replace the kid with the clone,” Ceq said. “She wakes up in the morning and finds her son brain-dead, but it's the fake. The real one is already gone, and she thinks her kid just had a brain haemorrhage or something overnight. No investigation. Just a tragedy.”
Zhai looked at his shoes. “That was the plan, yes.”
“That is seriously fucked up, boss.”
“Yes,” Zhai murmured. “Yes it is.”
Ceq shook her head. “Why? Why go to all that effort? What was so special about the kid?”
“He was V-able,” Zhai said. “You know how they don't let you into casinos?” Ceq nodded. “Same principle. A small subset of people with V-sight can recognise other V-able people. Most of them work as screeners. Some of them work for governments. So, as I understand it, the plan was to abduct the child, have him adopted on another world, and recruit him into the V-navy at the earliest opportunity.” He glanced at Grey Hawk, anticipating her reaction. “There you go. Official confirmation, as if you needed it.”
“It was obvious what was happening,” Grey Hawk said. Then, after a pause: “Considering the others.”
Ceq's head whipped round to Zhai again. “Others?”
Zhai breathed in deeply through his nose, closing his eyes for a moment. “Yes. This was the real problem. This was no isolated incident. This was a program. I asked them how many kids they had abducted and replaced with vat-grown doppelgangers. All I got out of them was 'a lot'. And incriminating evidence of the scheme was now in the hands of the Naroese authorities. With the flash-clone in their custody, it would be clear what had happened, what the plan was. They would start digging. They would quickly find others, mysterious cases of sudden infant brain death overnight, and they would connect the dots. So would other worlds, because this wasn't confined to Naro. It would be a spectacular political catastrophe. It would threaten the entire Coalition. How would all the other member worlds react if they found out that the Coalition was stealing their children for the V-navy?” Zhai shuddered. “I knew right then that this was the big one. I was sitting right on top of the biggest domestic political crisis the Coalition had ever encountered.”
“What did you do?” Ceq asked.
Zhai seemed to make a conscious effort to look her in the eye. “I – was young. Ambitious. And even after they told me that, I believed in the Coalition so strongly, I – thought it was justified. For the greater good. The kids were all right, after all. They were too young to remember their real parents, and the V-navy isn't a bad life, especially in peacetime.”
“And what about the parents?” Ceq said softly. “They still lost their children.”
“At the time, I believed that their grief was – unfortunate, but worthwhile.” Zhai's voice was almost a croak now. “I saw it as a necessary evil.”
No evil is necessary! Grey Hawk wanted to scream. She wanted to seize Zhai by the lapels of his impeccable suit and scream it in his jowly face, as if it might resonate through him and into every one of his kind in the galaxy – but even as her anger flared, so too did the sad knowledge that men like Zhai could never see the world like she did. They could all agree that human society was a towering superstructure of innumerable interlocking evils, winding around and supporting each other, justifying and precipitating each other, caught in an endless cycle of violence and oppression – and men like Zhai would shrug and say well, that's just how the world is. What are we supposed to do about it?
They were too far gone to even conceive of a world without those evils, because for them it was an oxymoron. The rules were broken, but they couldn't imagine playing a different game.
Ceq's face was still blank, but at Zhai's last words Grey Hawk was sure she saw a twitch of disgust at the corner of her mouth.
“What did you do?” she asked again.
“I made the only choice I could,” Zhai said. “It was too late for a cover-up. The evidence was out there. Naro was already lost. The public hated us, they just didn't know it yet. Our only option was to lie like hell. We had to muddy the waters, to confuse everything – and find a scapegoat. Nobody would believe us if we pointed fingers, but if we created a coordinated public relations and media strategy of obfuscation and vague insinuations, we could shift the blame around. If people don't know who to blame, then their anger is nowhere near as potent as real, directed venom. People like to be fair, or to think themselves fair. So, of course, we blamed the Developists. Not just on Naro, but on every Coalition world, on Armenaiakon and Megereth Station. The leaderships knew the score, naturally. They knew we were falsely accusing them to cover our own tracks. The problem for the Devvies was that nobody in the Coalition government trusts anybody. They could swear up and down that it wasn't them and it wouldn't sway anyone outside the highest echelons, and the same applied for us. We had done it, but we could sling a whole lot of mud at them.”
“So you lied.”
“Ceq, I'm a professional liar.” Zhai sighed. “Of course I fucking lied. And it worked, everywhere but Naro. They knew what we'd done. Within a week they had uncovered thirty possible cases of abduction, with more turning up every day. A faction within their government started pushing hard for secession. They were fringe at first, but as the evidence mounted, everyone turned on us. The government, the media, the people, everyone. The woman whose son we'd tried to take was publicly assassinated – I think by either the Devvies or her own government, to make us look worse, but we never found out – and that sealed it.
“They organised an emergency referendum on secession less than a month after the incident. Popular support was in the high seventies. They hated us. More specifically, they hated me. I was the face of it all, the living, breathing embodiment of the baby-snatching Coalition. I survived an assassination attempt on my way to the space elevator on the night of the referendum, and by the time I left orbit, the newly independent government was rushing through legislation declaring me – personally – an enemy of the state. I think I got out with nine minutes to spare. The law still stands. If I went back, I wouldn't even get a trial.
“But I always knew N
aro was a lost cause. I was playing the longer game. If we'd handled it wrong, Naro might have set off a chain reaction of secessions, which would have been the worst disaster for the Coalition since the Expansion Wars. As it was, they handled it wrong. They rushed into secession too quickly, and the way their government was instantly taken over by isolationist anti-Coalition fanatics after generations of willing membership played in our favour.
“When I got back to Megereth Station, the Consolidationist leadership put me in charge of our messaging, and I started to push back against Naro as well as the Developists. Maybe it was them all along, I implied. Maybe it was a false flag operation to justify secession. After all, nobody could prove that all these brain-dead infants were flash-clones, and if they could, they couldn't prove the snatch squad was ours. Nobody could prove anything, and the speed of Naro's secession made them look suspicious.
“That was what saved us on other worlds. Perono had a referendum on secession too, but more than sixty percent voted to stay. We turned the tide, created enough confusion and uncertainty that nobody else was willing to secede, and the Consolidationists even gained seats after the next round of appointments to the First Circle. They gave me a medal.”
“You're proud, aren't you?” Ceq said. Now the disgust was more than a ripple. It was more like a tidal wave bearing down on Zhai, who suddenly looked very small and very old. “You're actually proud of what you did.”
“No,” Zhai said hurriedly, “no. I didn't mean to sound like that – I mean, yes, at the time I was proud, but – it's – I'm not –”
“I've heard enough,” Ceq murmured. “Thank you, Ambassador.”
She had always called Zhai 'boss' before. The word 'Ambassador' sounded unnatural and contemptuous in Ceq's mouth.
The bodyguard opened the door and got out, neglecting to close it behind her. Zhai, lost for words, watched her go, his lips soundlessly trying to find something to say. For once, they came up empty.
“You know how to contact me,” Grey Hawk said, after a few seconds. She left the car and walked away, leaving the silent, shrunken ambassador behind.